Israeli warplanes struck Gaza

Israeli warplanes struck Gaza early on Friday after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed four Israelis near a West Bank settlement, an attack the new Hamas government called a "natural response to Israeli crimes".

Photo: Israeli warplanes struck Gaza

The suicide bombing by the Palestinian militant group al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades came days after Hamas took office and Israeli leader Ehud Olmert's Kadima party won elections on a platform of setting borders in the West Bank if peacemaking remains frozen.

Israeli officials said the bomber, whose group is part of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction, was disguised as a religious Jewish hitchhiker and blew himself up when Israelis in a car picked him up near a settlement.

The suicide attack was the first such bombing in two months.

Hours later, Israeli warplanes destroyed several sites in northern Gaza and artillery gunners fired shells in open areas in the territory that the army says Palestinian militants use to fire rockets into Israel. No casualties were reported.

Palestinian militants in Gaza frequently fire rockets into Israel and killed two Israelis in one such attack last week.

Israeli forces also later detained several suspected militants in the West Bank, a military source said. Israeli media quoted security sources as saying two men were involved in the suicide attack, one of them being the bomber's brother.

Mushir al-Masri, a spokesman for Hamas, which took office after its government was sworn in by the Palestinian parliament on Wednesday, called the suicide attack a "natural response ... to the continued Israeli killing, incursions and arrests".

The Islamic group beat Abbas's Fatah in a legislative vote in January and is sworn to Israel's destruction. The militant group carried out about 60 suicide bombings during a Palestinian uprising in 2000 but has abided by a truce since March 2005, reports Reuters.

I.L.